The fields of telemedicine and home healthcare have experienced strong growth in recent years. In a telemedicine system, a patient is geographically removed from the presence of a doctor or other healthcare provider. For example, the patient could be at home instead of on site at a healthcare facility. Telemedical devices enable the healthcare provider to monitor the health status of a patient and potentially diagnose and treat some medical problems without the need for the patient to travel to the healthcare facility. The use of telemedical systems has the potential to reduce the cost of healthcare, and to improve the quality of healthcare through increased patient monitoring.
Various known telemedicine systems provide a device to a patient that enables the patient to transmit medical data to a doctor or healthcare provider. Some devices are configured to record biosignals, such as heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration rates, and transmit data of the recorded biosignals to a database for later review. Other telemedicine systems provide reminders to a patient to take medications at prescribed times or to perform exercises as part of a physical therapy regimen.
While telemedicine systems have numerous potential advantages, such systems can also present difficulties to patients who often use telemedical devices without the assistance of a healthcare professional. Providing an intuitive user interface increases the effectiveness of the telemedical device and also increases the likelihood that patients will use the telemedical devices assiduously. In some environments, telemedical devices also need to distinguish between different patients to provide appropriate treatment to each patient. For example, in a retirement community a large group of patients may use telemedical devices, or members of the same family may each use a telemedical device for different treatments. Some forms of telemedical device are handheld units that are portable and can be inadvertently exchanged between patients. Thus, improvements to telemedical devices to ease interactions between the patient and the device and to ensure that the telemedical device provides an appropriate treatment to each patient would be beneficial.